Monty outstrips them all

Made for a very modest $3 million, The Full Monty continues to, ahem, outstrip the competition on both sides of the Atlantic and is shaping up as one of the most profitable movies in cinema history. On its first nine weeks on release in Britain and Ireland, it has grossed £29 million, passing the previous record for a UK production - £27.7 million, set by Four Weddings And A Funeral. It now ranks as the fourth biggest hit of all time in the UK and could well overtake Men In Black for third place, while in Ireland it's poised to be the biggest hit of the year. In the US The Full Monty is powering away at the box-office, with $25 million in takings after 11 weeks on release. Last week it opened in Australia and went straight to the top of the charts.

The film was turned down by Channel 4 and subsequently funded and released by Fox Searchlight, the specialist division of 20th Century Fox, which has now acquired the film rights to The Weir, the latest play by Conor McPherson, the screenwriter of I Went Down. McPherson will make his film directing debut with a movie of his earlier play, The Lime Tree Bower, for the UK production company, Hand-Made Films.

Further to my report last Friday on the problems with the video release of Donnie Brasco, the film's distributors have withdrawn all 3,300 Donnie Brasco tapes carrying the unclassified trailer for Preaching To The Perverted and have replaced them with copies without the offending trailer. And Preaching To The Perverted itself has been rejected by the film censor's office. Directed by Stuart Urban (one of the directors of the TV series, Our Friends In The North), Preaching To The Perverted is a British film featuring Tom Bell as an MP determined to bring a private prosecution against British fetish clubs. He recruits a young computer salesman (played by Christian Anholt) to infiltrate a London sado-masochism club run by an American dominatrix played by Go Fish star Guinevere Turner. The rejection of the film is unlikely to be appealed.

Joining the guest list at the Carte Noire Ninth Dublin French Film Festival are producer Jerome Vidal and director Claire Simon. Vidal will introduce Monday's 4.10 p.m. screening of Familles, Je Vous Hais (Families I Hate You), an innovative production which was shot in just three weeks and deals with a young girl growing up in an extreme right-wing family. The documentary-maker Claire Simon will introduce Tuesday's 6.10 p.m. screening of her first narrative feature, Sinon, Oui (A Foreign Body), in which a young woman pretends she is pregnant to prevent her husband from leaving her. Both guests will participate in free public discussions in the IFC Meeting Room - Vidal on Tuesday and Simon on Wednesday - both at 1.15 p.m.

This is just 20 lines of gobbeldy-gook about some silly story or other which will be replaced by Michael's pristine prose tomorrow. This is just 20 lines of gobbeldy-gook about some silly story or other which will be replaced by Michael's pristine prose tomorrow. This is just 20 lines of gobbeldy-gook about some silly story or other which will be replaced by Michael's pristine prose tomorrow. And of course we won't forget to put in the new story because that would be an appalling lapse of concentration and taste.

The arts and culture minister, Sile de Valera, will also be the guest speaker at a major conference on Challenges & Opportunities In The Film, TV And Multimedia Industries to be held at the Corrib Great Southern Hotel in Galway on November 20th and 21st. Themes will include maximising the opportunities presented by new technology; developing a successful production company; traditional and creative financing; and film distribution. Among the other speakers will be Simon Channing-Williams, who has produced all of Mike Leigh's recent films; BSE chief executive Rod Stoneman; producer David Collins of Samson Films; Brendan McCaul of Buena Vista International (Ireland); Kieran Corrigan of Merlin Films; and film journalist Angus Finney.

Information from Tomas Hardiman Communications, Envision House, Flood Street, Galway. Tel: (091) 569109; fax 565876. email: thc@iol.ie.

Now shooting in northern Queensland in Australia, The Thin Red Line, based on the book by James Jones, is the first feature directed by the elusive Terrence Malick since Days Of Heaven almost 20 years ago. Dealing with the battle between US and Japanese combat troops on Guadalcanal, the $50 epic has a stellar cast that includes Sean Penn, George Clooney, John Travolta, Gary Oldman, Nick Nolte, Bill Pullman, Woody Harrelson and John Cusack, along with rising actors Adrian Brody, Ben Chaplin and Jim Caviezel. It is produced by the Texans, Bobby Geisler and John Roberdeau, who first approached Malick nine years ago to direct an adaptation of the DM Thomas novel, The White Hotel. Malick turned down their offer, suggesting instead an updated version of Moliere's comedy, Tartuffe, or The Thin Red Line.

The producers emphasise how non-jingoistic Malick is in his treatment of the Japanese conflict in The Thin Red Line, which will not be in cinemas for another year. Nine months have been allocated for editing the film which is likely to have its world premiere at the New York Film Festival next September. Malick's first movie, Badlands, was launched at the New York festival in 1974.

Geisler and Roberdeau are also planning a Broadway stage production of Malick's version of the Japanese fable, Sansho The Bailiff, which was filmed by Kenji Mizoguchi in 1954. The busy producers are making a film of David Rabe's In The Boom Boom Room, to be directed by the Oscar-winning documentarist, Barbara Kopple, and an adaptation of Theodore Roszak's cult novel, Flicker, by Alien screenwriter Dan O'Bannon. And they finally are about to bring The White Hotel to the screen, with Emir Kusturica set to direct from an adaptation by the late Dennis Potter.

The next John Waters movie will be Pecker, which started shooting last week in the writer-director's home town and regular location of Baltimore. Following the experiences of a working-class young man who becomes a celebrated photographer, it features Edward Furlong, Christina Ricci, Martha Plimpton, Brendan Sexton and Lili Taylor.

Ex-rapper Mark Wahlberg, so impressive in Boogie Nights which is due here in January, is in talks to co-star with Robert De Niro in the boxing drama, Out On My Feet, to be directed by actor Barry Primus. Andrew Davis, who made The Fugitive, is to direct A Perfect Murder, the remake of Alfred Hitchock's Dial M For Murder, and Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow will take the roles originally played by Ray Milland and Grace Kelly.

A unique film-maker whose work was critically neglected for years before he finally received overdue recognition and acclaim, Samuel Fuller, who died last week at the age of 86, was a true maverick. A former journalist who was New York's youngest crime reporter when he was 17, Fuller had written a number of pulp novels before serving in North Africa and France during the second World War and was awarded the Bronze Star, the Silver Star and the Purple Heart. His experience of journalism, crime and war shaped his outstanding work as a screenwriter and film director, and he achieved a great deal despite the constraints of working on very low budgets for most of his career: Park Row, House Of Bamboo, Forty Guns, Run Of The Arrow, Underworld USA, Merrill's Marauders, Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss and The Big Red One.

I had the pleasure of meeting Sam Fuller at the Edinburgh Film Festival in the mid-1980s. A sardonic, utterly unpretentious and hilariously funny observer of the film world, he made for wonderful company over what was to be a luncheon interview but never moved beyond the bar, where the cigar-chewing Fuller downed one Bloody Mary after another. Unfortunately, much of what he said was unprintable because of the risk of libel.